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This article concerns the question of how legal academics imagine ‘outsiders’ perceive legal academia. Centralising our empirical work undertaken at a UK research intensive University which explored the attitudes, beliefs and knowledges of non-legal academics about the field of legal academia, we focus on the findings flowing from benchmarking surveys with legal academics which invited self-evaluations of the field of legal academia as well as imagining how non-legal academics (’outsiders’) might evaluate the field of legal academia. Of particular interest, we note the presence of a curious divergence between self-perceptions of legal academia and their ‘imaginaries’ as to how ’outsiders’ will perceive the field. Supported by a review of the legal scholarly literature, our study reveals a persistently bleak ‘folklore’ surrounding the question of how ‘outsiders’ will regard legal academia – though critically, one which on the basis of our empirical work, finds little root in reality. Providing the first study of its kind, and offering a range of novel analytical techniques, we highlight the significant purchase of empirical meta-disciplinary work of this nature for better understanding legal academia and its relationship with other fields. While undertaken as a scoping study, we identify potential opportunities for raising the profile of legal academia in wider spheres, as well as enhancing opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration. As we argue by reference to our findings, part of that work may simply involve legal academics projecting their more positive self-perceptions of their field and the value of their work to the outside world.

Fear and Loathing in Legal Academia: Legal Academics’ Perceptions of Their Field and Their Curious Imaginaries of How ‘Outsiders’ Perceive It